I ATE'NT DEAD

Land's End, Cornwall, on day three.

I have just been out. Tony (Kali's brother, with whom I'm staying while in London) and I have been out touring the south west of England on his Bandit 650. That's a motorbike. A black one. We decided we'd take three days to get down to Cornwall and back, finding B&Bs on the way and generally just spending most of each day riding.

We learnt a few things on this trip. One of these is that finding a place to sleep - even on a very wet, very cold weekday - in a seaside town in southwest England during what they try to pass off as summer here, is pretty close to impossible, no matter what Angus says. Another is that a good way to round off city-riding-squared tyres is by nearly getting blown off the road by wind gusts. Another, although one kind of implicitly knows this, is that riding for long distances is always much pleasant when there is sun. So here is the story.


Day one. Rode out of London. It's quite big really. It's not like Auckland where there is a motorway right through the middle of it, either - that's what the Underground is for. Unfortunately Tony's bike wouldn't have fit through the turnstiles even if we had taken off the luggage, so we had to ride. It took us the best part of the morning; we stopped for lunch and we hadn't even reached Richmond!

We finally made it to the M3 (SW motorway), and the heavens opened. Damn. We pulled in to a service stop to don our wet weather gear (we had, rather hopefully, left it off) and then got under way again. A few hours of riding along exposed motorway on one side of the wheels, and we were in Dorset. We chose a few likely looking roads to what looked like they might have been pretty beachside towns where we might have found B&Bs. Upon reaching said towns, we were nearly blown off the bike whilst looking at the beach, and the towns themselves didn't look that charming at all.

We continued on to Bournemouth where, after about half an hour's search leading to the surety that everywhere in the whole place was booked and we would have to dig a hole in the ground for shelter that night, we found an ugly-looking B&B-cum-hotel on a main road which was actually quite nice inside. The proprietor was "bike friendly", so he let us put it in the garage ("Priavate Property - No Entry - Beware Two Dobermanns") rather than leaving it in the public carpark out the front, so the seats were even dry in the morning!


Day two. As we came down to leave, one of the two Dobermann dogs made an appearance. I was feeling brave, so I gave it a pat. It was really cute actually, much like a labrador in behaviour. Then it decided that seeing as I was giving it attention it would go get one of its toys. It came back with a short bit of rope in its mouth - it wanted to play tug. Let's just say you never want to be playing tug with one of those over a limb. Even if it was attached, you'd lose.

We rode on along the coast for a while, and pulled in after a little while at a place called Bridport. It's a pretty little town, with some neat cliffs. We went to see them, but the wind was such that even walking up on to the beach was nearly too much! A true gale was blowing - I have a video of us leaning against it. The waves were amazing!

We decided to take some back roads to connect up to the main road southwest. My, were they ever back roads! Little dirt tracks with with high hedges so you couldn't see out of the lanes, and with no signposts to speak of. So we got a little lost. By this time, of course, it had started raining again. And it was lunch time - we were hungry! So it was with great pleasure that we stumbled across the Shave Cross Inn. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by paddocks and lanes and hedges and with nothing in the way of civilisation anywhere I could see.

It was a fabulous old pub - all low ceilings (and I do mean low!), black irregularly placed beams, whitewashing and thatch on the outside. No rushes on the floor, but it totally could have had. It was quite busy - not difficult I guess as there were only two large tables in the room - it was very small - so we sat at the bar to eat. I had a ploughman's lunch, with more cheese that you would believe could fit on one dinner plate. It was good cheese though, and there were enough pickled onions to counter the cheesy mouth-stick so I made a good dent in it.

As we were eating, predictably, it started raining again. And not just raining; I mean Raining. It poured down! So we stayed for a coffee. It eased off after a while so we again got back on the bike. Luckily I had packed a fishing rod, so while Tony drove us ever so carefully through some now very flooded muddy lanes, I was able to focus on catching us something for dinner.

That night we stayed in a little place called Moretonhampstead. It is such a small village that it doesn't exactly require two names' worth of name; it is obviously compensating for its size. Or perhaps it's just indecisive. Dinner, due to my lack of fishing skill, was at a very nondescript pub, the owner of which was a large, burly woman with short hair and a nervous gaze. I assume that it was her who had decided on he decoration for the back of the women's toilet doors, as Tony assures me that his were very uninterestingly adorned.


Day three. We left nice and early on Friday morning, heading down through Truro where we had lunch and watched a Punch and Judy show (Itchy and Scratchy are less horrifying) to Land's End and back in a figure eight, so as to see everything and then start on the A39, a road we had heard was quite fun. Our first stop after lunch was St. Ives, a patricluarly popular beach town. It was quite amazing. So many people and shops... it was like Mission Bay crossed with the main street of New Plymouth crossed with Venice - the last mostly because of the fat pasty British tourists and their screaming children. If one could empty out all the people and the shops, then give it a decade or more alone so that the ecology could recover, I imagine it would be a truly beautiful place.

Land's End - the southernmost part of mainland England - was dressed up with the trappings of an amusement park, but the complex sat uncomfortably on the wild Cornish coast, looking as if the land was planning to shake the irritatingly gaudy buildings off the cliffs and in to the sea at the first opportunity. I would approve, especially as the shop didn't sell sherbert lemons.

Around the coast further and we arrived at Penzance, which we felt no need to stop at - we just drove down the promenade and onward to Falmouth, where the A39 began. We followed this road away from the coast and through some lovely green scenery - old glades as well as the inevitable agrarian scenes - and to our B&B for the night.


Day four. Back on the A39 after the best breakfast of the whole trip, and a nice long ride took us to to Lynmouth, a town built on some very steep hills indeed! Steeper than Korokoro in Wellington, although somehow safer feeling. We had a bagel and some tea there, then moved on toward Bath along some pretty fun roads. It was getting to time to sort out our night's accomodation by the time we got to Glastonbury, but they were hosting a crop circle convention *cough* so all their accomodation was booked out. We decided to strike out into unclassified back-roads to try to find some small town to stay in.

We drove for a while and it got later and later, and we hadn't passed a single B&B. It was six p.m. by the time we decided to stop at the Vobster Inn, and ask them if they knew anywhere which had accommodation. They did, and although the ones they had numbers for were all booked up, those had a few numbers of places, and eventually we found a place. We ate at the Vobster - fabulous rainbow trout! - and then limped off damply to Lime Kiln farm, which we (eventually) found.


Day five. Well, the expected three days of our journey had long passed us by and we were down to emergency measures with underwear. The discomfort was compounded by the fact that when the owner had said the room was "ensuite bath", he really meant it! No shower. Just a bathtub. Bizarre! Anyway, there was a lovely fruit salad at breakfast, as well as the usual greasies, so that made up for it. We drove in to Bath and had a bit of a look around (nice, but not as amazing as I have heard - the little villages were cooler), then drove on to Stonehenge. We didn't stop - what is the point really when they are right next to the road like that? I could se them perfectly well. I found it surprisingly impressive, actually.

We rode north across the Salisbury Plains where we saw a "tanks crossing" sign, and then went to look at the Avebury henge. I found it less impressive than Stonehenge - perhaps because the monoliths were so much more rough-hewn and so widely spaced that you didn't really get the sense of a unified structure. After that, it was back on the bike and on to the motorway for London.

So that was the end of that, you might think. Well, you're partly right. It was all plan (boring motorway) sailing until we got back into the city. The traffic around Oxford Circus was incredible! I wondered what was happening to cause the congestion; then I saw a guy waving an Iraqi flag out of the window of a car. And then I saw another one. The more I looked, the more people from that part of the world I saw in the cars. "What do you think has happened?", I asked Tony. We came up with all sorts of theories while we watched car after car filled with jubilant Iraqis. We finally decided that the most likely thing that had happened was that the new British Prime Minister had pulled the British troops out of Iraq.

We eventually made it through the traffic and got back to Tony's. Avidly we got on the net, looking for what was causing the traffic chaos in the city. War? A new Middle Eastern state? The death of Tony Blair? George Bush's head on a pike? As it turned out, it was none of these, nor even our more moderate pet theory. No, the Iraqis had just won the Pan-Asian Soccer Cup.

So we went for a pint. The End.